Greetings from the Bezant Team!
The second quarter of 2019 has been full of milestones for Bezant, where all our success has validated our hard work and direction.
The highlights of Q2 are comprised of these four things: 1) our foray into the P2P Lending space — a billion-dollar global industry — 2) our Binance DEX listing and required next steps to be listed onto the main Binance exchange (CEX), 3) Technology side updates, and 4) the Bezantium Mainnet. These four are huge milestones for Bezant and can be considered accomplished feats by Blockchain industry standards.
Q2 has also brought on more projects to help Bezant scale — from new partnerships who have begun to adapt our Blockchain platform, Bezantium, to internal company milestones that have allowed us to progress even further, and move us closer to our goals. Even partners from foreign shores have now adapted our technology and have given us more hope for the future.
And lastly, we’ll also cover in this report what you, our dear community, can expect in the coming months for our business and platform.
1. P2P Lending for the “Un-bankables”
Many crypto projects have claimed that they will solve the problems of the 1.7 billion “unbanked” in developing countries by providing “financial inclusion” through the application of their unique blockchain protocols. For instance, Omisego (OMG), an early entrant into the crypto industry, stated that they will “Unbank the banked with Ethereum”, while most recently, Facebook’s problem statement in their Libra Whitepaper states that there are “1.7 billion adults globally [that] remain outside of the financial system with no access to a traditional bank.”
Unfortunately, these projects do not address the needs of the unbanked — OMG is currently focused on their ‘Plasma’ backend technology as opposed to creating products that the unbanked can actually use and Facebook’s Libra will actually require users to have a bank account or credit card in order to purchase Libra coins, in effect, creating their own crypto for use within their “banked” ecosystem.
Enter Transwiz, a P2P lending platform based in Bangkok, Thailand, whose goal is to provide alternative lending to the 450 million unbanked in South East Asia. Transwiz will run on the Bezantium blockchain which will provide: transaction speed/scalability of at least 1,000 tps, transparency (immutable ledger), privacy of information (permissioned network), and security (consensus), and is developer-friendly through smart contracts (chaincode) that can be programmed in Java, Node.js (java script) and Golang.
Some of the service highlights of Transwiz are:
- Marketplace ecosystem for Lenders and Borrowers
- Can accept both traditional fiat investment and cryptocurrency
- Loan terms can be negotiated and agreed on Chaincode or Smart Contract
- Maximum interest rate at 24–36% per annum
- Short term loan agreements at 60–120 days
- Daily pay back both principal and interest
- Buy Credit Guarantee as option to protect your investment
- Ranking system and Referral Program
- Documentation and data management on borrowers and lenders
Led by Phadet Wongpayaban, former Executive at Thaicom — leading satellite operator in Asia — and also the Managing Director of Jehmi Thailand, the Transwiz lending service was preliminary launched in February 2019 and loan value has grown at a rate of 50x over a four-month period; and a 17x growth in users over the same period. The service is currently in beta with participation by invite only and on a limited basis. Full services are expected to launch in 4Q of this year.
Transwiz is one of our most important and strategic projects for this quarter because this service will show a real use case application of blockchain technology that actually solves the unbanked problem — a problem that OMG, Facebook, and so many others have just begun to write about in their Whitepapers.
2. Cryptocurrency Exchange Listings
We believe that a longer term approach to “liquidity” and market value is needed for the sustainability of any token project. And in order to achieve this objective we have been having discussions with many exchanges about listing our BZNT tokens. Our management had decided that it is in our best interest to focus on only those exchanges with real and high trading volume (liquidity) and a reputation for ethical trading and business practices. Furthermore, it has been our policy not to pay exorbitant amounts to exchanges in the form of listing fees and other indirect marketing fees.
After careful consideration of our options, we decided to proceed with a Listing application for Binance DEX. The decision allows for us to enhance interoperability between the Bezant blockchain and Binance Chain. We strongly support Binance’s move to establish a decentralized exchange which is grounded on community governance. Bezant’s Community Proposal was posted on July 5th, 2019, Bezant received an unanimous 11 out of 11 vote by Binance DEX’s validators; and the BZNT-464/BNB trading pair was listed to begin trading on the Binance DEX on July 7th, 2019.
Going forward: Bezant will be consciously making efforts to qualify and be selected for the Binance BEP2 Community Listing Program, which would allow the BZNT — 464 token to be listed on the Binance CEX or Main exchange. Such an event could take place as early as the end of August.
With the addition of a Binance CEX listing, our token holders will have liquidity options on the top-2 global cryptocurrency exchanges.
3. Technology Side Updates
During the first half of this year, we also worked tirelessly on improving the features in both our testnet and mainnet. Our team for this quarter focused on three major feature enhancements for Bezantium along with network maintenance and stability efforts.
(1) In any enterprise solution, data privacy — especially when it deals with sensitive information — is always critical. Because of this, we’ve offered our partners an easy way to keep their data private by providing private launching channels. These channels in our blockchain represent a partition of the network, and these private channels allow partners to transact securely and privately.
(2) We are also constantly building our tech resources and tools for all of our present and future partners. In line with that, we’ve updated our API’s to help our partners to allow for easier integration. We’ve also updated in our API’s different sample Chaincode templates for them to use with different use scenarios depending on their needs. For more information on this, please feel free to check the Documentation in our Github.
(3) In our partner admin console, uploading Chaincode is one thing but having it screened for any technological syntax and grammar errors is another. This proves to be even more critical when it comes to smart contracts. So, in order to address this concern, we’ve added a critical feature, the Chaincode Pre-check, which allows you and your team to automatically check your syntax when you upload the Chaincode and immediately gives you feedback on whether or not your Chaincode is following the prescribed guides (i.e. grammar and syntax). This makes it easy for troubleshooting your chaincode faster than before.
4. Bezantium — The Bezant Mainnet
At the end of March, we completed the development of ‘Bezantium’, Bezant’s mainnet. In line with our mission to bring blockchain to the world, Bezantium allows our blockchain-as-a-service platform to empower world’s businesses to operate their service on a blockchain network with just a few clicks!
From our update at the end of March:
“Bezantium provides a variety of development environments where partners can create blockchain-based services and integrate them into existing businesses; making it easy to use blockchain technology without having to build and manage separate infrastructures. Its major functions include partner web admin, wallet management, token issuance/management, smart contract deployment/management, and network management.”
We opened Bezantium to the public last April, with Bezant Scan and Wallet services now available. Steve Tay, Foundation Director of Bezant, took to the stage at Deconomy 2019 in early April to share the news with the world.
For more information on this milestone, read the full article here.
5. Partner Updates
This quarter, we have also on-boarded several new partners to help us strategically expand and fulfill our vision. We are excited to finally unveil some of the new partnerships as a result of these efforts!
Hanjudo is a B2B Fintech company based in Korea and they are targeting the “Investment Market” which is the heart of all startup ecosystems. Hanjudo models itself from “Carta”, which is a US-based unicorn company that has gained over 300million USD in investment from different investment groups such as Goldman Sachs and Andreessen Horowitz in May and has risen to a $1.7 billion valuation.
Hanjudo aims to develop solutions to manage shareholders, stock and stock option issuing as well as management for VC’s and startups. Normally, VC’s and startups record their data manually, most commonly through excel spreadsheets which in turn lead to many issues. Through Hanjudo’s service, the 4000 start-ups and 200 venture capitals will be able to easily do equity raising, issue stock, and stock options all online, thereby addressing the problems above.
The strategic partnership between Bezant and Hanjudo will allow Hanjudo’s services to be built on top of Bezantium, utilizing blockchain technology to offer immutable data for individuals and institutional investors.
Hanjudo aims to garner trust through the use of blockchain technology as a platform for unlisted stock trading. Korea currently has over two thousand public companies listed under KOSPI and KOSDAQ, whereas there are hundred thousands of unlisted private companies. There are also a total of 4 trillion won held as funds that startup VC’s hold per year, where approximately unlisted stock trading amounts to over 30 trillion won annually.
Nova Learning is a Thailand based education start-up that seeks to serve the huge tutoring industry in the country.
Thailand’s massive 10 billion-baht (300M US dollar) tutoring school industry is a byproduct of the poor public school education in the country. In fact, according to The Borgen Project — a non-profit organization working to alleviate poverty and lack of education — while the Thai government guarantees free education for everyone under the age of 15 (including foreigners) the lack of funding has severely disproportioned the quality of education between schools, most especially in rural areas where teachers often have to care for several classes across different grade levels.
More and more middle class to affluent families are subscribing to tutors in order to give their young children a fairer advantage in the global education rankings. According to WENR, O-NET examination scores — an examination given at the end of Grade 9 and 12 and is a prerequisite for promotion to the next grade level — currently account for only 30 percent of the final Matayom 6 (Certificate of Secondary Education) results, a criterion for university admission. And because pass rates can be low and are geographically uneven, students from Bangkok score significantly higher on average than students from rural regions, thereby fueling the need for tutoring or educational resources outside of the traditional space.
Nova Learning aims to introduce a blockchain-based marketplace ecosystem where tutors are compensated for their content and where students can find high quality education materials to aid in their studies. Furthermore, through blockchain technology, certificates and records can be awarded to participants and guaranteed authenticity.
Chequer is a database management solution company that distributes Korea’s most widely used SQL DB management tool — SQLGate. Chequer has decided to integrate our blockchain technology into one of their key products, QueryPie, which will prevent unauthorized modifications and enhance the transparency of related log data. Testing has been completed and all the necessary functionalities of Bezant’s BaaS has been approved and ready for implementation. By 2021, we are targeting roughly 3 million USD in revenue from the implementation of this platform.
6. Platform Side Updates
Jehmi Contents Platform
The Jehmi Contents Platform was one of the original platforms that we were developing as an early implementation of how blockchain can be used in the digital marketplace. We had decided to put the release on hold as there were unforeseen changes in the market during the time, in addition to the feedback from our partners in different sectors.
Now that the launch of our mainnet has been completed, we’re now re-focusing our efforts to enhance the original platform to address the issues and concerns we previously faced. As such, we are targeting to release the first module of this platform by the first quarter (Q1) of next year.
Jehmi Wallet
A crucial component in our platform update is the Jehmi Wallet because it is an important enabler for our cross-border solutions. Development of this wallet was delayed due to a number of regional regulatory obstacles we had to overcome.
Despite the regulatory obstacles and adjustments to the business models we had initially planned, we achieved a very significant step by acquiring an MSO (Money Service Operator) License. The MSO license enables us to take our planned services and partnerships forward to it’s next phase. We target to launch the features of the Jehmi Wallet in phases first and foremost to accommodate partner requirements. As such, the beta version with fiat and multiple payment methods enabled is targeted for release by the fourth quarter (Q4) of this year.
7. Project Updates
Deconomy 2019
Steve Tay was invited to speak at Deconomy 2019 on behalf of Bezant. This year, Deconomy had over 3000 attendees from over 180 companies. There were over 70 thought leaders and Fintech vanguards who spoke at the event, and was attended by more than 240 business and tech journalists from the region.
During his session, Steve talked about Bezantium and shared some of the projects the team was working on at the time. Bezant was also able to sponsor a booth during the show.
Mini Hackathon at Bezant
Bezant organized a partner mini-hackerthon in the Bezant Korea office last May. We chose a select few to deeply engage in the development of chaincode (smart contract) templates for different industries. The event went quite well some of the attendees shared some pretty good feedback the event and about Bezantium.
8. Event Updates
IBM Blockchain, The Next Wave
On May 28th, Bezant spoke at an IBM-sponsored seminar called, IBM Blockchain, The Next Wave, and showcased a successful case of the world’s first commercialized blockchain platform based on the Hyperledger Fabric. The event was full of industry leaders who wished to incorporate blockchain onto their existing business models.
We were excited to share our collaboration process with IBM to develop our platform, and further discuss new opportunities, not only with the attendees, but also with IBM Blockchain Platform members as well. Because of this, we’re now definitely looking forward to new collaborations in the near future!
To watch Bezant’s presentation, please visit our YouTube channel!
Tconomy DApp Ecosystem Meetup
The Bezant Team was invited to speak at Tconomy DApp Ecosystem Meetup on June 13th, where approximately 250 DApp developers and enthusiasts gathered to share insights. Binna Park, Senior Business Development Director of Bezant, explained 3 key factors to consider to choose the perfect BaaS platform and what Bezant can provide to partner companies.
During the event, we met potential partners and industry insiders to promote our platform, and to share our vision to contribute to the growth of the blockchain ecosystem.
You can watch our recap video on Bezant’s youtube channel.
D.VIP Season 2
Bezant started a private meetup program with D.Street, an active blockchain marketing company in Korea with many innovative campaigns. D.VIP is a meeting program to connect those interested in blockchain/cryptocurrency and promising blockchain projects. For the 4-months period, a select few potential partners were able to meet the Bezant team members once a month to learn and discuss more about a collaborative project.
We all enjoyed May and June’s fierce nights of discussion! We are looking forward to the next meetup on July and a final conference on August to wrap up the season.
9. Internal Updates
In this industry (one might argue, and all other fields as well), however, the only constant is change, and with that comes the inevitable movement of talent.
Julian Migura, one of the foremost advisors for Bezant, long time friend and colleague to several members of the core team, has decided to step down from his current role. Citing more time with his new family, Julian left the staunch members of the community with a very positive parting message:
“It’s been an absolute pleasure and honor working on such an ambitious project as Bezant and I believe we’ve done some really great work.
Jehmi and Bezant have a very capable team willing to provide great and innovative products and solutions that can really make a difference.”
Julian has committed to remain available as an advisor to Bezant should the need arise.
BuzzPerch coming in to replace CrowdCreate has also been a much needed upgrade, as the community managers are more proactive and more attuned to the needs of the community. BuzzPerch also streamlined all of the social media channels of Bezant and — once more content starts coming in from Bezant side — they’ll be able to properly maintain all of Bezant’s online properties, making sure to address community concerns across several platforms.
And another key addition to the Bezant team is Iggy Javellana, the CMO of Ywiser Inc., a tech-focused marketing agency. Iggy comes from a diverse background of digital marketing and advertising, having pioneered digital and content in the Philippines for nearly two decades, working closely with fintech, entertainment, pharmaceutical, and FMCG companies. Bezant has recently engaged Iggy as the Interim Global Marketing Director to assist in defining the position and direction of Bezant’s global marketing and advertising efforts outside of the Korean market.
10. Future Plans
The future holds some very exciting plans for Bezant, starting with the influx of new marketing efforts coming in the next quarter.
A. Events and Conferences
First off, Bezant will have a much stronger presence in Blockchain events and conferences in the next quarter, starting with Steve being invited to talk at the Singapore Blockchain Summit and Bezant having an exhibition booth in the show. We’ve also confirmed attendance to the Hyperledger Members Summit of 2019 in Tokyo where we will have a chance to seek out more potential global partners, as well as Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, where we have also secured B2B attendance at the show.
In the horizon, we also have speaking engagements being negotiated for Malta AI and Blockchain Summit, Seamless Philippines 2019, and more.
The SG Blockchain Summit will be on August 20, at the same time as Gamescom in Germany, while the Hyperledger Members Summit will be on July 30 and 31.
B. Marketing and Community
Content Marketing
One of the biggest thrusts moving forward is our content marketing efforts, where we plan to produce more regular content across all of the social media platforms, starting with regular updates from the team on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Medium, all of which will be shared with the active community on Telegram and Reddit.
Part of the reason behind this is quite simple: tech and finance brands (actually, brands in general) that share more meaningful content on social media are perceived to be more relevant and credible, and therefore perform higher overall in terms of building trust and confidence in the brand. In fact, according to the Meaningful Brands Study 2019 by Havas Media, Meaningful Brands outperform the stock market by 134% and key to that growth is due to effective content marketing. So part of our initiative is to create content that will suit not just our existing community, but also newer audiences in the blockchain space.
PR Efforts
We are also in the pre-planning stages of setting up a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Steve in the next few months where Steve and the core team can address the Bezant community’s questions, address their concerns, even talk about life and hobbies and more.
We’re also acquiring the services of a PR Firm to help with more publicity efforts and events, a deal we are currently closing with DIFY, a Blockchain PR and Marketing Agency based in Singapore and will be activated in the next quarter. In so doing, we hope to be able to revitalize our excellent PR presence in 2018, and gain more credible references throughout local and international publishing partners.
Additionally, we’ve also been invited to list on XAngle (Xangle.io), touted as the most accurate disclosure platform for crypto assets. They have been institutionalizing crypto information disclosure and project evaluation with leading exchanges such as Korbit, CPDAX, GOPAX, bithumb, and more to be disclosed soon.
We’re proud to announce that we were given a GRADE of A on the XAngle platform and are currently ranked #34 out of all the projects on their project listing.
More details of all our PR, marketing and community efforts will be released in the coming weeks.
C. Future Updates on the Technology Side
Developing a platform is an on-going process which means we need to continuously be aware of the different trends in this space, but more importantly, we must be always conscious all our partner’s needs.
BRC721
After continuous dialogue with our partners, we’ve noticed that some of their needs revolve around needing a secure, accurate way to track items digitally — specifically, unique items. As a way to cater this need from our partners, we will develop a feature onto Bezantium where you can digitize items and non-fungible items. This will help solve a lot of needs that arise from logistics, supply chain, game item, and et al.
This feature definitely has a lot of potential and we can’t wait to unlock with this feature, which in turn will allow us to make new partnerships and service more industries and partner-clients.
Stable Token
Another feature that our community and partners should expect is the Stable Token feature. This is what many partners expressed their interest in. Partners will be able to create a token that has all the technical requirements for a stable token.
Token Converter
One of the things our community has been requesting for is a mass token swap feature for our ERC20 to BRC20 or native bezant cryptocurrency. However, after a lengthy and exhaustive analysis, the team arrived at the most optimal recommendation and decided to opt for an interoperability model instead of the token swap. This Token Converter will actually support both Ethereum and Hyperledger — the world’s largest and second-largest enterprise blockchains, respectively.
Currently, our development team is building the Token Converter service which will allow token holders conversion capabilities of BRC20 tokens with ERC20 tokens. Therefore, if a partner who has listed unto an exchange with an ERC20-based tokens, and they wish to maintain both token economies of Ethereum and Bezantium, they can use the converter to allow them to do just that!
And for the future, we plan to expand the interoperability model to different leading blockchain platforms, making our Token Converter even more valuable to the community. For now, the Token Converter will take precedence over an outright token swap feature.
P2P Lending Platform
Now that our work on Transwiz is full steam ahead, we now more than ever believe that we can proceed with making blockchain truly accessible to everyone by enabling this P2P platform all throughout South East Asia! In fact, Transwiz already has plans of expanding the reach of their platform to the rest of the SEA and Indochina region, including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
Providing this P2P lending platform to developing nations in Asia and around the world will surely bring the company to a much higher level of usability and provide much more concrete evidence to the world that this technology will help in fact grow the industry.
We are now seeking partners who will take on this P2P Platform to launch and market it as a white label product in other SEA countries. If you are interested in taking part of this worthwhile endeavor to service the unbanked and grow the fintech industry, please reach out to us here.
In sum, the Second Quarter of 2019 was truly a remarkable year for the company. To reiterate our highlights above, the launch of our Bezantium Mainnet, updates on the technology side to better assist and integrate with partners, our listing onto Binance DEX with continued efforts for listing on the main exchange, CEX, and our P2P lending platform initiatives — all of these milestones and even more key partners have given Bezant the boost it needs to grow its credibility and stability in the blockchain industry.
If the length of this progress report is any indication, we’ve managed to achieve more out of this quarter than other previous progress reports and provide an overall positive impact in our growth and reputation, now more than ever.
The future is truly exciting. And with you, our dear, loyal community, continuously supporting us, we strongly believe that we can achieve our mission of bringing blockchain closer and more accessible to the world!
Thank you very much, and we look forward to the next quarter update!
Please continue to follow us on the following channels.
Until the next progress report, dear friends!
Follow our official channels for the latest updates
- Telegram : https://t.me/bezant_official
- Telegram Announcement Channel (English) : https://t.me/bezant_io
- Telegram Announcement Channel (Korean) :https://t.me/bezant_kor
- Twitter : www.twitter.com/bezant_io
- Medium: https://medium.com/@bezant_io
